Ford Motor's flexible-fuel Taurus won't work properly on heavy doses of ethanol fuel, as Ford claims it will, a Nebraska corn farmer, Nebraska state officials and a Washington advocacy group allege.

A Ford (F) memo to dealers last November acknowledges that the cars are hard to start even when burning a very low concentration of ethanol, E10, or so-called gasohol. Many stations across the country sell E10 as their ordinary regular-grade fuel.

Ford instructed dealers how to modify the vehicles this year, but it was only partly successful, and owners were charged for the repair if the vehicles were out of warranty, even if they began complaining during the warranty period, says Todd Sneller, administrator of the Nebraska Ethanol Board.

His '04 Taurus, supposedly fixed, "now starts on the first or second crank if I turn the key and wait 15 seconds first. That's better than four or five cranks that it used to take. But it's still different from any other flex-fuel vehicle I've driven, and I've been driving them since 1992."

Ford says the vehicles should be fixed and running properly by now, and in most cases the costs should have been covered under warranty.

Sneller says managers of Nebraska's government vehicle fleets told him they had to pay, even though their complaints began during the warranty period. "We have some very upset fleet managers," he says.

The problem comes to light as ethanol and vehicles that use it are championed by the federal government and Detroit automakers as a way to trim the use of petroleum. Flexible-fuel vehicles — FFVs — such as the Taurus look like conventional, gasoline-only cars but have special hardware and computer programming intended to accommodate anything from straight gasoline to E85.

Ford is teaming with ethanol producer VeraSun to get more stations to sell E85, a mix of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline. Only about 1,000 of the 170,000 U.S. service stations offer it now. Expanding the use of E85 benefits U.S. agriculture interests that make ethanol, or grow the corn from which most of it is made.

Officials in Nebraska, a major corn producer, worry that motorists will blame the fuel, not the cars. The Taurus situation "unjustifiably associates the use of E85 fuel with these problems," Gov. Dave Heineman said in a March 14 letter to David Buss of Hastings, the farmer who complained that his 2005 Taurus FFV was hard to start and ran poorly on E85.

Buss said in an Oct. 11 letter to the Federal Trade Commission that Ford should be forced to buy back the flex-fuel Tauruses because they don't work as advertised. That would be about 218,000 cars, according to Ford, which says it hasn't heard from the FTC yet.

Sneller says other FFVs in the fleets run fine on E85 and E10. Buss says his Chevrolet FFV pickup does, too.

Flex-fuel vehicles "operate no differently on E85 than they do on gasoline. Our FFVs are certified to operate on E85. Should any individual customers have issues, we would encourage them to contact Ford," Sue Cischke, a Ford engineering vice president, said in a statement. Ford says it has more than 1.6 million FFVs of all types on the road. Spokeswoman Jennifer Moore says a problem with ethanol can't be widespread because, "We would have identified it in our ongoing field analysis" of those vehicles.

Public Citizen, a Washington watchdog group, says Ford ought to be ordered to refund $135 million in federal fuel-economy credits it got for selling the FFVs.

"There's no other company we know of that has this problem," says Joan Claybrook, head of Public Citizen.

Buss says he bought the Taurus FFV because he wanted to use "exclusively E85 to support my trade."